Opening her eyes, Maud regards the man whom she has been waiting to see again for over a year, and he is... thrice the man he was. During the twelve months when she has been pining away for Geoffrey, he has grown positively corpulent. Maud, who has a prejudice against stout men due perhaps to her distaste for her portly brother Percy, is horrified: first by Geoffrey's rotund figure, and then by the thought that she is so shallow as to now be repulsed by the appearance of this man whom she had vowed to love forever. Her erstwhile object of affection sits down heavily and orders food- a lot of it. While waiting for it to arrive, he talks constantly about food: the meals he ate on his late uncle's yacht, and all the dishes he ate in various foreign ports. After his meal arrives, Geoffrey orders extra butter and slathers it thickly over his toast. Maud starts to visualize him as a tub of butter with arms and legs and shudders.
Two days after the dinner party at Belpher we find Maud at a dingy tea shop in London called "Ye Cozy Nooke" presided over by two lugubrious, aged gentlewomen. Geoffrey has written asking her to meet him there, though she wonders uneasily why he wanted to meet her in such a hole in the wall instead of at the Savoy. She finds herself growing nervous and jittery about seeing Geoffrey again after so much time. Closing her eyes, she finds herself thinking about George Bevan and is comforted by the memory of his decency and friendship. She feels calmer until she recollects that George is leaving for America, a thought which makes her upset all over again. While Maud is sitting with her eyes closed, she suddenly hears Geoffrey's voice. Opening her eyes, Maud regards the man whom she has been waiting to see again for over a year, and he is... thrice the man he was. During the twelve months when she has been pining away for Geoffrey, he has grown positively corpulent. Maud, who has a prejudice against stout men due perhaps to her distaste for her portly brother Percy, is horrified: first by Geoffrey's rotund figure, and then by the thought that she is so shallow as to now be repulsed by the appearance of this man whom she had vowed to love forever. Her erstwhile object of affection sits down heavily and orders food- a lot of it. While waiting for it to arrive, he talks constantly about food: the meals he ate on his late uncle's yacht, and all the dishes he ate in various foreign ports. After his meal arrives, Geoffrey orders extra butter and slathers it thickly over his toast. Maud starts to visualize him as a tub of butter with arms and legs and shudders. Geoffrey finally pauses in his litany of meals around the world to gaze reproachfully at Maud. In injured tones he inquires why she didn't wait for him. Maud, startled out of her dismay, is confused by this until she realizes that he must have seen the announcement of her engagement to George which her father had put in the papers. She starts to explain that it is all a misunderstanding, but then pauses, hesitating to tell him what actually happened. Geoffrey asks her pointblank if she's engaged to George and Maud freezes; she is too honest to tell an outright lie, but the thought flits through her mind that it would be such an easy way out of her present predicament. As she teeters on the edge of the abyss, deliverance arrives in the unlikely form of a seedy private investigator. The fellow addresses Geoffrey by another name and tells him that he has a summons to a breach of promise suit to give him. Maud, grateful for the interruption, explains that he is mistaken: that's not Geoffrey's name. The PI says there's no mistake; he has pictures and eyewitnesses, and that it just makes the case stronger that Geoffrey deceived the young lady in question under an assumed name. Geoffrey denies any involvement with another woman, but the PI produces a photograph of Geoffrey- the newer, voluminous version of Geoffrey- with a note written across it in his handwriting, addressed to "Babe" from her "Pootles". The "Babe" in question is, of course, the young actress whom Billie had told George about, darkly predicting that she was being led astray by a shady character. His summons delivered, the PI cheerfully takes his leave, leaving behind him a sudden awkward silence. Maud gets up and says that she thinks she'll be going, and Geoffrey starts making excuses: it meant nothing... a man has weaknesses... surely she isn't going to throw him over just because he lost his head. Maud looks him up and down and says sweetly that he didn't just lose his head: he lost his figure as well. She nips out the door and Geoffrey attempts to follow her but is stymied by one of the elderly gentlewomen demanding payment for his meal. By the time he reaches the street, Maud is gone.
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